Wednesday, August 18, 2010

I spent the day writing down notes and scripting out what I want say during my presentation. I sent my powerpoint to Joe Pow at around 2pm, via email. It wasn't until 4:20 that I realized Joe asked for it strictly by flashdrive (thanks to Ory.) I loaded my presentation on to a flash drive and headed downstairs to Joe's office. He was not happy to say the least. By the end of the day I nearly finished all of my speaking notes. When I got home I practiced my presentation and it came out to 9 minutes and 45 seconds. I will run through it a couple times tomorrow and try to work the kinks out of my spoken part of the presentation.

I added images to my presentation and had that done just after coffee. I sent my presentation to Jake who suggested I add SEDs, Spectral Engergy Distribution, to my presentation as it gives more information. At about 3:30 we had our astronomy meeting and Stefi Baum invited me to send her my presentation. Later on, at about 8 pm, I saw she responded saying it looked good, which means that I am done with that part of preparing for my presentation.

Last week. I worked all day on my presentation. By the end of the day, my presentation was done with the exception of Images. It was weird with the Insight Lab being empty throughout most of the day, with most of the Undergrads having finished last week.

Friday, August 13, 2010

In the morning, I watched a number astronomy/physics based presentations before lunch. All of the presentations by members of the insight lab, that I saw, were quite interesting to say the least. I must have heard the definition of AGN and how they function about eight times, but each piece of research had its interesting points. After lunch I went back to the insight lab to work on my presentation, only to find that the one I had been working on the prior day was missing. I came to the conclusion that I must have accidentally saved it in the 'TEMP' folder or something, as I remember saving it yesterday right before leaving work. I had to remake the presentation. It was and much faster the second time doing it.

I finished working on J0058+2651 in the morning. It was weird going to coffee with the Undergrad guys for the last time. It will be even more weird next week when they are gone for the summer. I had lunch with Kevin, Chris, Ben and Bryan at crossroads. After lunch I worked on my powerpoint. I started to flesh out the information in the presentation. We all went to room 1155 for a practice symposium at 2. After that I continued a little bit more on my presentation before heading home.

Both of these days were more of the same. I continued to revise my program and the images I created. By the end of wednesday I had stopped using the program as each image and galaxy had such individualized characteristics. I had one challenging galaxy, J0058+2651, that was difficult to work into the form that Mark wanted. I finished all galaxies except J0058+2651, which was saved for Thursday.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

I finished making the other half of the galaxy Images for Mark by mid-day time. I went down to his room where we went through each of the images and compiled a list of about twenty changes that were necessary. This project is nearly finished for me. I fixed about five of the problems before leaving, the rest can be fixed tomorrow.

Well today I differentiated the various image making programs to meet the requirments of the different types of galaxies. The galaxies have visual images from a number of different sources that causes a nightmare in the programing. I finished most of the code for this project after Mark made a visit to the insight lab and helped me work through some of the mistakes in the program. By the end of the day I had about half of the galaxies finished.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Once again, I was working on debugging this image making program for Mark. I am making progress, but very slowly as there are around 70 galaxies that I am processing into final images. Bryan, an undergrad in the Insight Lab, started his marshmallow challenge. He must eat nothing but marshmallow's for the next 5 days while we all get to eat food around him. This may be fun.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

In the morning I fixed the scaling issues that were noticed yesterday. After coffee, I went to crossroads for lunch so I could make it back to Building 76 for the PhD defense at 1pm. The defense was ineresting during the parts I actually understood or had a general idea of what was going on. It was very technical and the language was pedantic, making it difficult for anyone not working in the field to understand. After the defense I finished fixing most of the images and emailed Mark for further instructions. He gace me a list of things to do, including updating my wiki and setting permissions. That took me to the 5 o'clock meeting.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Today was similar to yesterday as I continued to work on the program. I got the program to produce decent images by the 3:30 meeting. While at the 3:30 meeting, the fire alarm went off and with that so did Dr. O'Dea. I started to work on adjusting the settings of the individual pictures inside the images until the day was over.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Start of another week. I cannot believe this job is in it's second half already. Today was undulating between frustration and happieness as I worked on my program for Mark. In previous jobs, when something went wrong, a solution was always evident. This work I am doing now is different as there are a lot of ways to program something to operate in a way that seems right, but it isnt. I worked all day thinking my method was correct to find out at the end of the day, it wasnt.

On this Friday of the fourth week here, I coded a majority of the "image maker" program for Mark. I worked most of the day reworking an old program that performed a similar task with very little success. As I was to leave early, I stopped working on the code when I hit a huge stand still and decided to download DSS images for those galaxies that lacked them. That task took me to about 3:30 when I decided to leave as my family had family coming into town and I have a habit of nearly going over hours each week.